Thursday, August 18, 2011

Q: Name a breed of dog that starts and ends with the same letter of the alphabet. Drop that letter at both ends, and if you have the right dog, the remaining letters phonetically will name some animals. What's the dog and what are the animals?

It's a bit of a stretch to say that the remaining letters are pronounced exactly like the name of some animals.

Edit: My clue was "stretch" referring to the shape of this dog. The puzzle also reminded me of this Sprint commercial

71 comments:

Here's my standard reminder... don't post the answer or any hints that could lead directly to the answer (e.g. via Google or Bing) before the deadline of Thursday at 3pm ET. If you know the answer, click the link and submit it to NPR, but don't give it away here.

You may provide indirect hints to the answer to show you know it, but make sure they don't give the answer away. You can openly discuss your hints and the answer after the Thursday deadline. Thank you.

The key to the phonetics is to pronounce the remaining letters the same as in the dog breed—although there is potentially still a vowel mismatch in the last syllable, this is splitting hairs. I agree the "some animals" clue is rather misleading, though.

In addition to the (intended?) answer that most of the clues are pointing to, there is possibly a second (see Bob K's clue)that starts with the full name of a common dog breed and leads to a variety of unrelated animals, including yet another female animal.

Lorenzo, are you using all of the remaining letters? I have the first and last animals you refer to (depending on you pronunciation). The middle part contains the proper name of several animals, two dogs and an elephant. Got a few leftovers.

I may be barking up the same tree as Lorenzo, but a variant name for a very popular breed works perfectly. It’s similar to the more common name and at least according to some accounts was the original name of the breed. But I’m not sure that Will would risk the flak he would get for using a variant.

After thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I don't have the answer Will is looking for, in that there's not really any "phonetic" pronunciation involved. That being said, the way the remaining letters are pronounced post-change is different from their pre-change sound.

My musical clue is Blue Öyster Cult. And my ego being as monstrously huge as it is, I'll just assume I'm right, and Mr. Shortz is wrong :)

One breed yields a word that, without even changing letters, can refer to several different animals. As Will is always trying to outfox us, I decided that first answer was too simplistic. Another breed, the one I think he's going for, yields the name of one other animal (via some phonological leeway). After spending all morning thinking about this, I'm going to go fix myself some lunch - maybe a hot dog on a toasted roll with the good mustard.

I immediately thought of the dog that you thought about first, jsulbyrne, but then switched to the second one. After last week's paucity of correct answers (only 101), I don't relish the answer counter's task this week because there are going to a lot of correct ones.

Yes – they said there were 101 answers submitted, not 101 correct answers. I expect they don’t really know how many correct answers are submitted any week of the year, not just last week… Too time-consuming, labor intensive and, at root, unnecessary. If I were NPR here’s how I would approach the winner-selection task.

Each submission generates an auto-reply e-mail back to the submitter. And each such reply has a sequential number associated with it. (In addition to the steps I write here NPR may do some sort of preliminary checking for duplicate names or e-mail addresses but that does not materially affect the process I describe.)

Then I would take the number of the first submission and the total number of submissions and use a little random number generator program to randomly select a number between the first and last submission numbers, inclusive. (I actually wrote such a program a few weeks ago in QBasic. It took 5 minutes and 6 lines of code.)

The producer reads the answer associated with that lone submission and if it’s correct the submitter gets the call. If the answer’s incorrect – or if the submitter is unavailable or is unwilling to play on the air – another random number is selected. This process continues until the randomly-selected submitter has the correct answer, was able to be contacted and wants to play.

It’s fast and foolproof. You know the number of submissions and have a randomly-selected player. You don’t know the number of correct answers submitted but I don’t think the world at large or NPR or Will Shortz really cares about that.

If you really wanted to get into it, you could randomly sample 10 or 20 answers and apply the percentage of correct submissions to the total number of submissions to estimate the number of correct entries. But as I said, puzzle geeks like us may care about this stuff like this but I don’t think casual listeners do.

- - - - - - - - - -

What I disliked so much about last week’s puzzle wasn’t the _idea_ of the thing which I actually think was rather clever word play. What sucked was the wording of the clue: “Take a common two-word phrase that's the present tense of a verb. Move the last two letters to the front without making any other change, and you'll get a new two-word phrase that is the verb's past tense.”

If you start with

EAT*space*AT

and follow the instructions you end up with

ATEAT*space*

Surely whoever wrote that could have done much better with some minor editing or re-writing.

I went ahead and submitted my answer, which I am sure is correct (to Will, anyway)(and I am willing to stake my reputation on it), but I despise this puzzle, perhaps even more than the poorly worded last puzzle.

"TV show: Kukla, Fran and Ollie." & "Let's also toss in Iran-Contra for good measure." These are both referring to the name Oliver, as in Oliver North, (sorry for using the name of such a dirt bag) and Ollie is short for Oliver and kids play a game where they chant, "Ollie, Ollie oxen free." I have no idea why as I was never a child and I still am.

Note:I am not sure if I would have solved this puzzle were it not for a clue or two as I lived in Germany for several years and this word is not pronounced anything like that over there. In fact, I used to hear Germans inform those who mispronounced it that it was spelled dachshund, but it is pronounced: lah hoy ah.

Help! Lorenzo and Blaine refer to "second answers" that might be hinted at in my clue. I only had in mind "Badger - Dachs, auf Deutsch", so simple that I thought it might be removed as a blatant giveaway. What did I say without knowing it?

And although "akita" is a cute answer, I don't see how it meets the "phonetically" requirement.

At least this week’s puzzle works – i.e., the clue reasonably leads you to the answer. Musical clue: Perry Como.

Last week’s puzzle had the fewest respondents I ever remember. And no wonder – the clue wasn’t just misleading, it was downright false. Worst I can recall.

- - - - - - - - - -

At least here in the metro St. Louis area dachshunds are humorously referred to as Hot Dogs or Wiener Dogs. In 1956 Perry Como had a #1 hit song, Hot Diggity Dog. And though I completely stand by my assessment of last week’s puzzle as being the worst I can recall, a wiener is a type of “wurst.”

SDB, I was working along the same lines.ermine, Shep, hare & daw.Shep certainly names a dog - somewhere.Daw is used for jackdaw.

I also tried to force something fromGerman rough haired pointing dog,but "pointing" seems to be necessary.with that deleted I gotenmine, ruff, hare, dawwhich only works if it's said quickly and the adjacent d d are elided.

That cartoon character was Chuga-chuga, a wiener dog or dachshund amongst the animals in Mr. Peebles pet shop in "Magilla Gorilla". You would never see *all* of Chuga-chuga on the screen at one time, and as he walked he would say (or kinda whisper) "Chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga, chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga, chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga,..."